Month: April 2017

The closer video game departments work together, the greater the resulting outcome can be. And when we further blur this line between Sound Design and Music and question whether there should to be a line.Then I believe this is where the future of game music can lye

“Have Sound Designers embraced games as a medium to a greater extent than composers? To this question I believe the answer is an undeniable yes” (Whitmore,2016)

Guy Whitmore (writer at Designing Music Now) believes there is a cultural focus on game composers being less engaged with the interactive tools available to them compared to game sound designers. “At least some “Integration” is done by 1 in 2 composers” – (Game Sound Convention Survey, 2015) meaning that only 50% of those game composers used interactive techniques. The use of Middleware such as AudioKinetic Wwise and Fmod is the current go to for implementing music into games with some advanced level of interactivity. Figure 1 shows a system for side-chaining music in an upcoming game (Get Even ,Bandai Namco. 2017) the effect in this example is the ducking of ambient SFX whenever the music pulses.

MIDI has been around since the 1980’s as a way to assign a CC or continuous control to a perimeter such as pitch, velocity, tempo with a value of 0 – 127. Wwise can use MIDI in addition to audio files to create music, and this MIDI information can be used to send data for real time processes and perimeters. in this example tempo of the music can be interactive. there is a layered combination of a drone sound, the pulsing louder sound and the environmental sounds all being sent through the same process. the steam and light buzzing sfx have been pitched to the same as of the music, purely for aurally pleasing reasons. I would encourage you to watch the entire video as there are more example of interactive music such as dynamic tempo and parallel layered forms used.

Figrue 2

Where things are heading with the use of Granular synthesis in engine, a powerful tool for Music and Sound Design